Product Description

Product Description

Amazon.com

Corel Painter 12

Corel Painter 12 is the finest professional digital art software in the market. Internationally recognized for its RealBristle Painting system, it lets users control brush behavior, pressure and color intensity more realistically than anything else when paired with a graphics tablet such as the Wacom series.

Painter comes with hundreds of brushes and dozens of paper textures, watercolors, paints, oils, pastels and more. Customers also have the option to create their own brushes at the click of a button, and customize their workspace and color palette for the best fit.

The new Navigator panel makes it easier to maneuver your way around large canvases.

Painter supports Adobe Photoshop files and should be considered a complement to not a replacement for Photoshop. Painter has a high-performance brush engine and the most realistic digital art tools available. Of key importance, it was developed for artists by artists, with tools that look, feel and move just like the real thing, allowing Painter to deliver the most authentic digital art experience. Start changing what's possible in art!

Ideal for:

Concept artists

Designers and illustrators

Fine artists

Professional photographers

Students and teachers of art and design

Painter 12--Reasons to Buy

1. High-value, built-in contentPainter comes with a broad array of pre-installed paper textures and brushes, such as watercolor media, acrylic paint, oil, pastel, chalk, pencil, marker and more. Choose a brush or create your own on the spot to produce unique brushstrokes and effects never seen before!

2. Exclusive to Painter! RealBristle PaintingReproduce the movement and feeling of traditional paint on canvas with your pen and tablet! Painter's RealBristle brushes represent a major milestone for digital painting because they are designed to be as responsive as real-life brushes when used with a graphics tablet, delivering the most realistic painting experience.

In Mirror Painting mode, the green line represents the mirror plane, which you can display vertically, horizontally, or both at the same time. View larger.

4. Exclusive to Painter! Kaleidoscope painting (New!)Go where traditional painting can't! This exciting new tool exists only in Painter, and allows you to create beautiful kaleidoscope effects on canvas. Use your choice of media to paint electrifying patterns and colors, and see amazing results when you add a blending tool to the mix. No other painting software in the world can produce such a 'wow' reaction!

5. Mirror painting (New!)With Mirror painting, every stroke you make is copied onto the opposite side of your canvas. Not only does this new tool greatly increase your precision and accuracy when painting symmetrical objects, it also saves you a lot of time!

6. Exclusive to Painter! Real Watercolor (New!)This unique wet media blends and dries more realistically than any other watercolor brush! Control wind direction for drying, and watch colors interact with the paper grain and change pigmentation in the most lifelike way. Also customize your paper texture settings to control how paint flows and pools on.

7. Exclusive to Painter! Real Wet Oil (New!)All of the fun, none of the mess or smell! Add this solvent to your oil paints to transform their look and texture. With 12 new tools, the Real Wet Oil category offers the perfect solution for blending and painting flowing colors. As the most realistic digital oil paint on the market, this new tool helps to further close the gap between traditional and digital painting.

8. Real Dry MediaRealistic chalk, marker, pen and pencil media (within the RealBristle system) lets you control opacity, color intensity, ink deposits and shading simply by changing the pressure, speed and angle of your pen on the drawing tablet--just like in real life!

9. Smart photo-painting toolsTransform photos into paintings by hand or let the Auto-Painting palette paint a photo for you using your choice of brush and media. The SmartStroke brush technology follows lines and contours in your picture just like a real artist would.

10. Agile brush control (New!)Change settings, such as brush size, opacity, squeeze and angle, using interactive controls that let you make rapid adjustments from one centralized location. Scalable resizing lets you preserve correct brush proportions, and you can use shortcuts to access brush settings even faster!

Product Details

Platform: PC/Mac Disc

Domestic Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.

International Shipping: This item is not eligible for international shipping. Learn More

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

This review is broken into 2 parts 1st paragraph, for everyone, 2nd for diehard painter/photoshop folks.(my background: I'm a professional game developer for Blizzard and I make my entire living using these programs.)

Until the release of painter 12 I thought that Corel was really polishing up a program that I have used since version 6! Then 12 came out, I think Corel is trying to distinguish their look from Adobe's programs and made it look like crap. The user interface has become more difficult to read and some real basics got harder to use and more intimidating for beginners. Look up painter 11 here on amazon, it's probably only for a limited time, but you can get it for about 70 bux! WOW! that is a deal and it's the right version to get.

OK, now for everyone who's been using the program for a while and is wondering what is new in version 12. Let me start by saying that all the UI elements - your tool menus, your palettes and everything got a pass with a fatter 'inkier' looking line that makes reading the actual icons more difficult and the entire program looks more juvenile, when in fact it is a beautiful piece of work. The custom brush palette (you know the one that you make by docking the brushes you use most often all together in one place..) no longer shows your custom colored icons that made it so easy to pick your familiar tools, now by default it displays them in black and white until moused over. Then you have to mouse over them all till you see that little visual que (color) that helps you recognize it so easily. It's not a total deal breaker, but personally I think that sucks. Next is the brush creator - No longer do we have a concise looking UI that just pops up and lets you edit brush properties, instead we regress to the stone age and have 48.Read more ›

I have to preface that I was a beta tester for this release and I cannot discuss anything during that time. My review is for the final product. So please do not ask about the betas, I will disclose.

This may be a lengthy review so the tl;dr (Too Long Didn't Read Version) is up top - more thorough after.

Edit- August 18th 2011: - Corel released their first patch and it also helps with multicore and performance improvements. It also seems that they're listening to customers where they'd like to see more releases and updates to the program.

----------------------------------------------------------------Painter gets an overhaul with its new release. While there are bugs that were present in past versions, along with new ones !boo! - The good does seem to outweigh the bad compared to past Painter releases that seemed more like patches to previous versions.

The Real Watercolors is a definite seller for me - to finally see watercolors that behave like watercolors for the most part. However, there is issues with lag.

The new interface and navigator window are definitely great. I also like the Brush category cleanup with some reservations. Like what happened with the Artist Oils?

The zooming has improved a lot in this version, and despite the bugs, thinking it over - I'd recommend this version because it's finally more of an update than a patch.Read more ›

I've been using Painter since it was sold in a paint can. This program does what others only attempt. I frequently use Photoshop, and other graphics programs, but painter stands alone. My only beef is the occasional crash, I can't remember ever having a crash in Photoshop, but painter does maybe once a week... I couldn't see giving it 5 stars with the crashing. But still this program does some pretty cool stuff.

I also want to mention the new watercolor brushes. I use to do water color with brush and paint. Painter 12 has revamped their watercolor brushes, on previous releases I haven't bothered with them because they never seemed to work realistically. However in Painter 12, It's looking very realistic. The "light Fringe Real Watercolor" Brush lays down color great. It has a "drying" effect that pushes pigment to the edges and also into the deep spots on the texture of the paper. Very cool! You have to wait a moment to allow the strokes to dry, but in the old days I worked with a hair dryer, and had to wait a couple minuets to dry areas, so waiting 10 seconds isn't really that big of deal (it would be nice if it was instantaneous though).

Another great feature is cloning now puts the source picture into the project picture file, so if you like to work on a piece on multiple sessions, you wont have to go hunt down the source file again.

All in all, a great program. some real nice refinements on this release. But please Corel stabilize this program. The price is a premium, the program should be able to stand without stumbling all the time.